Yaourt best practice

Hi,

I was wondering:

1) Is there a way to upgrade only the user packages with yaourt instead of all system (as in upgrade only the ones installed by yaourt)2) Is it wise to do a full system upgrade using yaourt ? (sounds dangerous)

Re: Yaourt best practice

1) My yaourt experience is probably less than a day, and I know this. This is the kind of thing that man pages and help (ie. the "--help|-h" switches) are for.2) It is not dangerous if you know what you are doing, like anything I guess.

I would advise you to learn how to use the package building tools on their own before trying to take the easy way out. AUR helpers are very convenient, but without proper understanding of what is happening, they can hinder more than they help sometimes. I use an AUR helper (cower usually and pacaur when I'm really lazy), but I also know how to do it by hand, and how to do general debugging.

Do yourself a favor, and try to use the AUR without it for a while first. Once you get the hang of it, you'll probably also see that there are far better options than yaourt.

Re: Yaourt best practice

2) Is it wise to do a full system upgrade using yaourt ? (sounds dangerous)

I don't think it is a good idea to use wrappers for pacman. pacman is extremely straightforward and it doesn't need further simplification.

The best practice is to separate official repos from the AUR and avoid applying the logic of unsupported to the stock system. Whatever AUR helper you are going to use, it will need to call pacman anyway(1). Therefore one that won't interfere with pacman doing its job is a good one. yaourt won't deal with this task in a satisfactory manner, IMO. (See the Forums' archives for examples.)

Edit:(1) Unless its sole task is searching the AUR and downloading source packages.

Re: Yaourt best practice

You can make an alias so that your repo packages are updated with pacman and then yaourt updates. That way it will only find aur packages because they are not in your repo. For example in my .zshrc I have:

Re: Yaourt best practice

dodo3773 wrote:

You can make an alias so that your repo packages are updated with pacman and then yaourt updates. That way it will only find aur packages because they are not in your repo. For example in my .zshrc I have:

alias update='sudo pacman -Syu && yaourt -Su --aur'

This is a great idea (I think), this is exactly what I was looking for.

Re: Yaourt best practice

I also think you should either use the AUR manually or use a rather "low level" AUR helper like cower, until you know, what you are doing. There's nothing bad about being lazy, as long as you are aware of the freedom you're giving up and know, how to fix broken things.

Re: Yaourt best practice

Honestly, just don't use any helper unless you truly have your heart set on it...

tar + 'makepkg -i' works great, and without any overhead that yaourt introduces. The only time it can be annoying is if you're installing an AUR package that depends on a bunch of other AUR packages...

Re: Yaourt best practice

Thank you so much people for taking the time and experience and suggesting.

After a few more days of using arch I believe the best thing for me is searching AUR using yaourt and manually downloading the PKG file and using makepkg to build it, then, using pacman -U to install the tar, I believe this is also giving me as a user more control over the process and let me take my time editing and viewing the PKG and *.install files.

Re: Yaourt best practice

Ba7a7chy wrote:

Thank you so much people for taking the time and experience and suggesting.

After a few more days of using arch I believe the best thing for me is searching AUR using yaourt and manually downloading the PKG file and using makepkg to build it, then, using pacman -U to install the tar, I believe this is also giving me as a user more control over the process and let me take my time editing and viewing the PKG and *.install files.

Uninstall yaourt then. It's overkill for what you will be using. cower is perfect for that: "cower -s" to search the AUR and "cower -d" to download and extract the tarball; then you just do everything else the old-fashioned way.

Re: Yaourt best practice

Re: Yaourt best practice

It is funny, how a lot of us dislike the most convenient tool written for the AUR. To clear this up a little, yaourt is not really a bad program and it does not break everything all the time. There are only two problems with yaourt:

1. New users tend to install yaourt from a custom repository, so they never learn, how to use the AUR. Some packages require a little manual intervention that cannot be solved by yaourt automatically. Some setups have disk size problems with the default folders for makepkg and yaourt, so building sometimes fails. While this is not an actual problem with the software, those people then show up on the forums, posting the yaourt output, being absolutely helpless. The default answer is a batch of links to the wiki articles of the AUR and makepkg. This is why I said, that new users should avoid such tools, until they know, what is going on.

2. Yaourt has also a history of not keeping up with pacman updates. While this happens, say, only three times a year, relying on yaourt for all package maintenance kicks the user out of his usual routine three times a year. While this is surely not the end of the world, it is again a reason for a lot of users to create new threads here, instead of reading the comments on the AUR page of yaourt or maybe the forum thread found on the page behind the source link. Knowledge about the AUR would lead to looking at the AUR page, klick the link, see if there are news, bugs or comments.

On my first round with Arch, I also installed yaourt from the external repository, half the packages I wanted did not build, so I thought "wow, this AUR things sounds cool, but it is broken" and actually went on trying another distro.

Re: Yaourt best practice

I (mostly) agree, Awebb, but yaourt - in it's simplicity - becomes a tool for giving people fish rather than teaching them to fish. And this is the problem.

Automating repetitive tasks is handy. To possibly over-extend the metaphor, once someone knows how to fish, a good reel can come in quite handy: it's much better than dealing with all that fishing line by hand. Give someone a reel, and they may learn to use it. Many aur-helpers are good fishing reels; yaourt is a coupon for a McFish sandwich.

Re: Yaourt best practice

Re: Yaourt best practice

When I go to update my system, I run two separate commands

pacman -Syyuyaourt -Sua

I only use yaourt to update the packages I have installed with yaourt. I know I could update my system with it since it will just call pacman, but I like to call pacman myself. No one tells pacman what to do but me.